Aggies, Horns and the creepiest day of the football year

This is National Signing Day, when hot shot high school football players sign on the dotted line and get scholarships to play college ball.

There are Web sites dedicated to this. There are tip sheets, news letters, radio and television shows that focus on it.

For the colleges, this is Christmas, Easter and July 4, all rolled into one. This is the day that their TPS reports are due. The college that gets the most polished TPS reports and the shinest toys (i.e. 18-year-old kids) wins the mythical recruiting title, which doesn’t mean squat if the team still sucks.

Kunta Kinte, 6′ 5″, WR, Namibia Bowie HS, uncommittedCoaches will pick athletes the way that ranchers go over the feeder cattle at the local livestock barn. And instead of USDA inspection, there’s the NCAA to make sure that stupid schools and greedy kids get caught cheating.

Put another way, this is the closest thing to slavery that’s still legal in the U.S. Kids will sign up for four or more years (Jordan Shipley, 10th year senior at UT, I’m looking at you) of indentured servitude. They will allegedly be given an education, but graduation rates among athletes is spotty.

As always the Longhorns will pull in an impressive haul, with a recruiting class will be nudged out for the top spot — just like football team — by an SEC team. Last month in the BCS title game, it was Alabama. This month, it will be Florida.

The Aggies will come in a distant second, but ranked as high as No. 9 in some rankings. Coach Mike Sherman is trying to right the Aggie ship. If former coach Dennis Franchione were still in Aggieland, there would be a run on kids who can quick kick. But there isn’t. And that’s why Fran is the Walter Mondale of college football.

Selected out-of-state schools will land a stud here and there since Texas is the Tigris and Euphrates of high school football talent. The rest of the state (Rice, UH, Baylor, Texas Tech) will divvy up the scraps.

I’d like thank God…and Rivals.comNational Signing Day means kids will pose with their parents and coaches for the local paper, then fax paperwork to the schools. That’s pretty much all of the excitement you’ll see until spring football practice starts.

Then, by mid-September, only a few weeks into the season, you’ll already know if your favorite team has a snowball’s chance of playing for the BCS title.

If your school has already lost a game, or if it didn’t start the season highly ranked, it has no chance. You, and your school, are totally screwed. Which means the months that you spent worrying about recruiting, as well as the big recruiting party you had at Chili’s, was wasted time.

At that point, you can stop worrying about your team’s on-field performance and start focusing on National Signing Day 2011.